Four Ways to Walk a Dog, part 3
By Michael Lenehan part 1 | 2 | 3
“HEEL,” USUALLY THE FIRST command a dog hears in training, is one of the last learned by a Seeing Eye dog. From the start these dogs are taught to pull ahead. Only after their training is well along—when they have learned to stop at intersections and walk around ladders and ignore the attentions of other dogs, children, and well-meaning adults—can they be introduced to the idea of heeling. When giving the command, the trainer drops the handle of the special working harness and holds the dog only by its conventional leather leash. The dog must learn that on leash it’s a follower; in harness it’s the boss.
The Seeing Eye, Inc., of Morristown, New Jersey—the first organization in the United States to provide guide dogs for the blind (and the only one entitled to the name Seeing Eye)—places about 230 dogs every year. A few of these dogs, mostly golden retrievers, are bought from breeders; a few are donated by the public; the rest are German shepherds and Labrador retrievers bred by the organization in its own kennels. Seeing Eye dogs are selected and bred generally for calm disposition and convenient size—they must fit comfortably under desks, restaurant tables, and so on—but a certain amount of variation is desirable. Blind people come in all sizes and temperaments, and so must their dogs.
Seeing Eye dogs are not quite the astounding creatures that myth makes them out to be. For example, they do not typically respond to such commands as “library” or “coffee shop”; their blind masters must tell them to go right, left, or forward at every intersection. Nor do Seeing Eye dogs read traffic lights. A much-repeated misconception is that, being color blind (as all dogs evidently are), they learn to stop for the top light on a traffic signal and to go for the bottom light. In fact their masters decide when it is time to cross the street, usually on the basis of what they hear; the dogs’ job is to disobey the command when crossing would not be safe. Seeing Eye people call it “intelligent disobedience.”
Most dogs need about four months to learn the job. For the first two weeks of this period they are drilled in basic obedience. For the last four weeks they practice guide work with the blind people to whom they have been assigned. In between they walk, walk, walk the streets of Morristown, five days a week, rain, snow, or shine, pulling behind them a band of dedicated and very well conditioned young men and women, mostly hearty, good-looking people dressed in the functional attire of the outdoor-fashion catalogue houses. Last summer I spent some time following one of these trainers, Pete Jackson, on his rounds. And I do mean following.
“THE BASIC THING WE’RE PLAYING WITH HERE is that the average domesticated dog wants to please humans. My goal is to teach the dog what makes me happy.” Jackson, blond, well tanned, and voluble, thirty-seven years old, was driving into Morristown when he offered this capsule analysis of dog training, nearly shouting to be heard over the clatter of his Seeing Eye van. Behind us, clipped to chains hanging from the truck’s walls, were his students for the morning, Zoe, Walt, and Mickey—two shepherds and a yellow Lab. (The names of all Seeing Eye dogs have been changed.) Jackson was working a string of eight dogs, all in their eighth week of training, their sixth week in town. Today, as on every weekday, each would get thirty to forty minutes of work. “The dog has its own concept of safety,” Jackson continued. “It doesn’t have to be trained to avoid bumping into things. What the instructor has to do is increase the dog’s degree of clearance, so its body becomes two and a half feet wider. It’s like the dog grows an extension. The most difficult thing for the dog is to learn how to start and stop this 150-pound human being at the end of the harness. They develop a skill similar to that of the leading partner in a dance.”
The Seeing Eye must take special measures to ensure that the puppies it raises will become devoted partners. Though they are not ready for formal training until they are about a year old, they cannot be kept in kennels much past their second month of life. Researchers have found that dogs undergo a critical socialization period, from about three to about twelve weeks of age, during which they form social habits that persist more or less throughout their lives. Puppies removed from the litter and given lots of human attention early in this period have been known to identify so strongly with people that as adults they have had difficulty mating with other dogs. Similarly, if a puppy’s principal companions throughout this period are litter mates or other dogs, it will probably never get along well with human beings; kennel-raised dogs are often nervous around people and distrustful of them. The general belief among dog people is that puppies should begin to receive a significant amount of human attention at seven or eight weeks of age; this gives them the opportunity to socialize with both dogs and human beings. The Seeing Eye farms its puppies out at the age of eight weeks to the families of 4-H Club members in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The 4-H families adopt the dogs for about a year, during which time they introduce them to elementary obedience exercises. Then the dogs return to the Seeing Eye for the first phase of their formal education, two weeks of intensive training in the basic obedience commands. They learn to sit, come, stay—no heeling, of course—and fetch, because guide dogs are sometimes called upon to retrieve dropped gloves or wallets for their masters.
The obedience drilling continues after the dogs begin training in the streets of Morristown. In a garage beneath the building that serves as the Seeing Eye’s downtown headquarters there, Pete Jackson took Zoe from the van—the others lay there quietly awaiting their turns—and began her training session with a brief obedience review. “It’s very important,” he said, “to continually remind the dog who the master is. In this obedience session there is no intelligent disobedience. It’s simply come, sit—you do it when you’re told to do it. If you do it you get praised, and if you don’t you’re punished. The dog has to be reminded of this every day, at least once a day. We do it in a neutral area where no guide work is involved, no responsibility other than to obey the master. Because five minutes later we could be out on the street and be in a situation where the dog might have to intelligently disobey a command.”
On the streets as well as in the obedience sessions the standard Seeing Eye punishment is a conventional leash correction paired with the reprimand “Pfui!” (The word is a German exclamation, a reminder that the first Seeing Eye dog, a German shepherd named Buddy, was raised and trained in Switzerland.) At this stage of training most of Jackson’s dogs were hearing only a few pfuis and a great deal of enthusiastic verbal praise, which is an important part of the Seeing Eye training formula. Zoe walked Jackson up to an intersection and stopped. “Good girl!” He commanded her to cross the street, which was empty, and she set out. “Good girl, Zoe.” At the opposite curb she slowed down so that he could feel his way forward by tapping his foot in front of him, as a blind person would. “Good girl.” Up on the sidewalk he told her to go left and she did, walking as far as the curb and stopping again. “Attagirl, Zoe. Good girl!” After crossing the street again, she steered him around a parking meter. “Good girl.” She slowed for a second to sniff a patch of grass. “Pfui!” She put her mind back on her work. “Good girl.” Jackson, who has been a Seeing Eye trainer for about twelve years, was so sensitive to the dog’s movement, and his reactions were so immediate, that sometimes I didn’t know which of the dog’s actions he was responding to. He told me, “People who are watching can’t appreciate the communication that’s going on between the dog and the handler.” The people of Morristown long ago accustomed themselves to the ubiquity of these harnessed dogs and their young trainers, but they may never get used to the merry babble that issues constantly from the trainers’ mouths. It seems to make sense to the dogs, though. The conviction that dogs understand and can be motivated by verbal praise—through tones of voice if not through the meanings of the words themselves—is nearly universal among dog people.
As Zoe led us toward a streetlight pole, Jackson showed me how he teaches a dog to allow for the person at the end of its harness. “Let’s say the dog was too far to the right here. What I would do to teach her clearance . . .” He deliberately walked smack into the metal pole, made a great deal of noise—including a loud “Pfui!”—and stumbled around histrionically for a second, a poor blind fellow who’d bopped his noggin because of his dog’s incompetence. Zoe was visibly upset. She stopped and cringed, as though his pain were her own. “Then I’d back up,” Jackson said, “to give the dog the chance to see the object in the perspective of its environment, so she can plan her move: How am I gonna get around that thing? This also gives the dog a chance to relax after the reprimand. You walk back, give her a chance to relax, turn around—Huh, there it is again; now let’s go and see if we can do it better this time.”
It’s not merely a matter of mechanics, Jackson emphasized. “Sooner or later the dog has just got to reach inside and draw on its own ability to figure things out. And that’s where the fun part comes in—after you’ve taught the dog basic avoidance, taught it to clear those extra two feet on the right-hand side, and you can feel that the dog is really starting to work for you. When you put the harness on, the dog knows it’s not going out for a walk. It may not understand completely everything that’s going on out there, but it does realize that for some special reason you need its help.” What’s in it for the dog? “I think these dogs could be some of the happiest creatures around,” Jackson said. “They’re not left alone in a kennel all day, they’re with someone, they’re working, they have companionship, and if you accept the idea that the dog wants to please human beings, this dog and all the other dogs in this program really have the ideal opportunity to please their masters all day long.”
Zoe brought us to a halt, for what reason I could not determine. But Jackson, who is several inches taller than I, was pleased. Though I had not noticed it—and would have failed to see its significance even if I had—Zoe, standing about two feet tall, had noticed a tree to our left whose branches were hanging over the sidewalk. Avoiding these overheads, as the Seeing Eye trainers call them—awnings and ledges as well as branches—is one of the most difficult lessons for dogs to learn, because they have no natural need to look for trouble six feet in the air. Jackson said, “Hup-up,” a command to go on. After hesitating a moment Zoe walked him to the right edge of the sidewalk, beyond the branches’ reach, and then continued on her way. “Good girl!”
“You could see her pause and wait there,” Jackson explained. “Without any pressure I just encouraged her to go on, and then she could have done one of two things. She could have just stopped and not moved, which would have signaled to me that I better start feeling [by waving his hand in the air] to see if there’s anything here. I could have found the tree, and then we could have walked under it. But instead, she made her initial move to the right, and I encouraged her by saying ‘Good girl, good girl,’ Think, think, do it, do it. She could have gone all the way out into the street and around, but she looked and saw we could get by the tree without having to step off the curb. It was a very good move; it showed a lot of good thinking power and confidence in this dog, which is exactly what I want to see at this stage of training. You know, there was no fear involved at all, she just thought it all out. This is the kind of thing that’s going to help a dog take care of someone.”
Mickey, the next dog out of the van, responded so well to verbal correction that Jackson almost never had to jerk his leash, even during the obedience session. A simple “Pfui!” was enough to make him wince and do better next time. Some of this was conditioning, Jackson explained: all of the dogs learn to expect a leash correction when they hear the reprimand. But not all of them respond to the word alone. Zoe, though Jackson described her as “fairly sensitive,” was also “active, lively, quick-thinking.” She needed to be jerked. But “Mickey wants to please me so badly that, even though he’s physically strong, I don’t need to jerk on him a lot. Every dog has to be handled differently.”
I saw Mickey thinking, or whatever it is that dogs do instead. We were standing at an intersection. Jackson said, Mickey, forward,” and gave the signal that always accompanies the command, a sort of underarm wave with the free hand. Mickey’s job now was to check the street for traffic and go forward only if all was clear. Instead he stepped immediately into the street. Just as immediately he stopped and began looking about nervously. I could see it in his face: he knew he’d made a mistake, and he didn’t know what to do next. “Sometimes a dog will do that because he’s too bold,” Jackson told me. “Other times they do it because they’re too nervous.” Mickey, he said, had been doing this a lot a few weeks earlier, though lately he’d been improving. “He was so nervous and afraid of me that when I said ‘Forward,’ he’d always obey me initially, and then say”—here Jackson began looking around frantically, in an uncanny mimicry of Mickey’s curbside panic—“Oh-God-I-shouldn’t-have, oh-no-I-gotta-stop. He wasn’t relaxed enough to think, Wait a minute, let’s take a look at things before we go forward here.”
What Jackson wants in a dog is a delicate balance between obedience and independence. In practical terms, he believes, this means he must be judicious in the use of force and dominance. “I could get a better obedience dog by being harder and more demanding, correcting them harder, but if you do that, what happens is you create a dog that’s too obedient, and then it’s reluctant to intelligently disobey out on the street.” Jackson told me that he sometimes experiments with a string of dogs, introducing subtle changes to the training routine to see what will develop from them. This time, he said, he was using less force in the obedience exercises, particularly in the fetch, which is the hardest to teach (the dogs have to pick up with their mouths such distasteful objects as flattened tin cans). The result seemed to be that the dogs, although they weren’t learning to fetch as quickly as usual, were learning their guide work a bit more readily. Jackson thought that by demanding a little less obedience he had won a little more imagination and initiative.
“I used to spend a lot of time jerking on the leash, because I figured it was the easy way,” he said. “The dogs take it, and somehow you can be successful with it. But after twelve years I think I’ve sort of run out of energy for it. There is probably a time and place for force with almost every dog. But I’ve found, year by year, that the more careful you are and the more attempt you make to get into the dog’s brain first—find out what the dog is, what he knows, individually, each dog—the less you have to do it.
Seeing Eye trainers have several other reasons for minimizing the force they use. They cannot rely too heavily on their physical strength, because they cannot be sure that the blind person who receives a certain dog will be strong enough to control it in the same way. Public relations must also be considered. Guide dogs, whether they are working or training, are often in the eye of a public that does not react well to the sight of a dog being physically corrected; the Seeing Eye receives a small but steady number of calls and letters complaining about blind people who have been seen “abusing” their dogs. Finally, the Seeing Eye can get away with a little less dominance than other trainers find necessary; the sort of strict obedience demanded by Bill Koehler, for example, is not required of Seeing Eye dogs, because they are always on leash or in harness.
None of which is to say that Pete Jackson won’t get physical when he thinks he has to. One of the dogs he was training while I was in Morristown was a German shepherd female that “had my number for a while,” Jackson confessed. “I was being a softy with her because I didn’t want to push her, I wanted her to learn at her own pace—but in a month and a half she never got any better, she would just never come around. Finally last week I just took the leash and yanked her hard once, stung her a little bit—you know, she yelped in pain—and ever since then she’s been an angel. I said, Damn, she’s been playing with me for a month and a half, making me do all the work. That happens all the time.” Another shepherd female was losing interest in her guide work about halfway through every training session, as though she were starting to think about getting off the street and back to the kennel. “I always ask myself,” Jackson said, “Would I take this dog if I were blind? And until I can say yes, I don’t pass the dog.” This dog was what Jackson would call dangerous—so far from ready that he had decided to hold her for another three months of training. Before giving up on her entirely, he said, he would try force, but he didn’t think it would work. “I’m fairly certain that if I get tough with this dog, what’s going to happen is I can make her obedient but I can’t make her guide.” Jackson’s attitude reminded me of Bernie Brown and his ladder of escalating force. Like Brown, Jackson believes that force works on some dogs—is indeed necessary with some dogs—but he starts with minimal force, to accommodate the “soft” dogs that do not react well to pressure. He resorts to sterner methods only when the easygoing approach fails, and when he reaches this point he begins, again like Brown, to lose confidence in the dog. Both trainers want their dogs to do things that they don’t believe dogs can be made to do. And unlike trainers at obedience classes—who take all comers thirty or forty at a time—both can afford to go slowly, and both have a surefire cure for the dog that doesn’t pass muster: wash it out of the program and give it to some pet people.
ONE MORNING I LEFT PETE JACKSON TO HIS DOGS and met his boss in the upstairs lounge of the Seeing Eye’s downtown building, where blind people wait with their dogs for a session of practice in the streets. Doug Roberts, the assistant director of instruction and training, started at the Seeing Eye as an apprentice trainer and has been there for some eighteen years. Now in his forties, he’s a relaxed, friendly man who’s serious about dogs. As we talked, he brushed the coat of Gilda, a golden retriever that had recently returned to Morristown because her blind master had died. Gilda was a special case. She was headed for the home of another blind person, which is not unusual in itself—but this person required a dog that would walk on the right side instead of the left. Later Roberts would be taking her into the streets to teach her new habits.
Roberts told me that a large part of Seeing Eye training is suppressing the instincts that the domestic dog has inherited from its predatory ancestors. “Dogs are just loaded with instincts,” he said. “In different dogs some instincts are more powerful than others.” Some dogs have a high chase instinct—“the squirrel goes, he’s gotta go.” In others, the sniffing instinct may predominate, or the scavenging instinct. “When we train a dog,” Roberts said, “we cannot eliminate an instinct. What we do is put it under the surface. The blind person then must keep it from the surface.” This involves drilling the dog in obedience every day as well as controlling it while it’s working. “If you’ve got a powerful, energetic dog that’s got that chase instinct, then it has to be matched carefully with a person who can handle that, who is energetic enough himself to keep that instinct down.” Training a dog to suppress its instincts involves a fairly straightforward application of Bill Koehler-style tempt-and-correct tactics. A scavenger might be walked along a route scattered with popcorn; a fighter might be led down a block where a particularly obnoxious and belligerent mutt is known to reside.
C. O. Whitman, as quoted by Konrad Lorenz in Man Meets Dog, said that the decline of instinctive behavior is “the open door through which the great teacher, Experience, can enter and bring about all the wonders of the intellect.” He was speaking in an evolutionary sense, not about individual dogs, but it occurred to me as I listened to Doug Roberts that something similar happens in the Seeing Eye dog. Roberts is the only trainer I met who was able to synthesize for me the viewpoint of the Koehler-style trainers—that dogs will behave reliably only if forced to—with the opposing view that dogs want to please their human masters. He said that while the Seeing Eye trains a dog, and for about six months after it has gone home with a blind person, the dog is in its “teenage years.” It knows what it’s supposed to do, but it is subject to distractions. “Like a teenager, it can do marvelously—both because it wants to, sometimes, and because it has to, at other times. Later, after it has gone through the adjustment of its teenage years, it wants to do the work.” It becomes, in other words, a responsible adult—able to curb its instinctive appetite for self-gratification, to appreciate the value of useful work, and, most important, to form lasting relationships based on trust and devotion. “When the dog is fully mature,” Roberts said, “it becomes what everyone considers the ‘Seeing Eye dog’—a special sort of bonding occurs where the dog feels like it is part of the person. You don’t get that in many human-dog associations. You can get really close attachment between a pet owner and his pet—you know, really superclose—but the twenty-four-hour-a-day I’ll take care of you association, that’s a bit different.”
How, I asked him, can such a bond be transferred? How will Gilda, the dog lying at our feet, develop that kind of devotion for a new master? A dog suffers tremendously when its master dies, Roberts admitted, but in a way its desperate need for affection and security—another instinct—makes the transfer easy. Since losing her master Gilda had been living in the Seeing Eye kennels without much human contact. “She hasn’t had any hands on in about a month,” Roberts said as he brushed her. “You can see she’s just loving this.” Her deprivation would last a while longer. “What we’ve done, and what we will do, is to give this little girl a break from any ability to bond herself to anyone else for a little while—not long. She’s not neglected by any means, but you can see she wants to go to you—Will you love me? Will you love me? The dog needs the security, the affection, the bonding. Therefore, if you give it a break, let it rest for awhile, and match it with someone else, it will rebond. You can humanize it if you want to: you can be totally devoted to your wife and she can die, and you can have a very good second marriage.”
One does not hang around the Seeing Eye long without hearing analogies like this. I once left the office of Richard Krokus, the Seeing Eye’s director of instruction and training, wondering if he realized how often and how easily his conversation slid from dog training to child rearing. Many trainers do it. A large part of the reason, I think, is simply that the human analogy is the handiest way of expressing what I’ve come to think of as a fundamental lesson, perhaps the fundamental lesson, of dog training: Dogs are individuals.
One of the classic studies of dog behavior, by John L. Fuller and John Paul Scott, was undertaken to shed some light on how genetics affects the behavior of human beings. The scientists chose the dog for their study, they wrote, “because it shows one of the basic hereditary characteristics of human behavior: a high degree of individual variability.” Michael Fox and his associate Randall Lockwood have explained how such diversity benefits the wolf pack: in a social unit characterized by hierarchy, cooperation, and division of labor, a range of temperaments is necessary. Only one wolf can be the alpha; as a rule only one female at a time can bear young. Such a society requires the timid as well as the aggressive, the deliberate as well as the impulsive, followers as well as leaders. Perhaps variety of temperament is another of the traits that qualify the dog for pethood; the unique relationship between dogs and people cannot be hurt by the fact that a dog can be found to match almost every human personality.
That individual dogs of the same breed—even of the same litter—can have vastly different “personalities” is no great secret. Any experienced dog person, and countless popular books, will tell you as much; certainly a great many have tried to tell me. But the lesson and its importance did not sink in for me until I visited the Seeing Eye. It’s in the air there. Every day Pete Jackson works with eight or ten different dogs—a bold one, a lazy one, a sensitive one, a nervous one, a shy one. Every fourth Saturday a new group of blind people arrives on the campus—bold ones, lazy ones, and every other type—and on Sunday each goes on a “Juno walk” with one of the trainers. The trainer, holding one end of a working harness, plays the role of Juno, a trained guide dog, and leads the person through the streets of Morristown. After this opportunity to judge their students’ physical strength, walking pace, and personality, the trainers huddle with their supervisors and decide which dog is best suited to which person. Making the right matches, they say, is one of the most important elements of the program.
I began to appreciate this when I met my own match, a German shepherd I’ll call Solly. Pete Jackson had prepared me to dislike this dog. He told me that Solly was timid, that he jumped at loud noises; for his first three weeks of training he had literally refused to come out from between Jackson’s legs. I was attracted to the dog from the moment I saw him. Unlike most of the Seeing Eye dogs I’d encountered, Solly walked at a pace that seemed sensible to me. He did not respond to precious talk or phony enthusiasm. He did not require elaborate displays of affection, nor did he give any. He did his work deliberately, intelligently, and (by the time I saw him) never made a mistake. I wanted to tell Jackson: This dog is not slow, he’s careful. This dog is not afraid, he’s reserved. This dog is not skittish, I don’t like loud noises either! When I did confess my admiration for the dog, Jackson was not a bit surprised. “Sure. He’s your kind of dog,” he told me. Jackson had known me less than two days at this point. He proceeded to deliver a brief analysis of my personality, enumerating a few traits that I thought only my wife understood fully.
When Solly and Pete Jackson taught me that dogs really do have personalities, I felt that I was beginning to understand dog training. All the conflicting claims of the trainers I had met, the hostile ideologies, the various methods that seemed to have nothing in common except that they all worked—now they fell into place behind words that Jackson had said to me on our first day together: “Every dog has to be treated differently.” If this is true, perhaps it follows that every method of training will work on some dogs, and no method will work on all of them. Dogs are resilient; most of them will do fine no matter what they are subjected to. But why shouldn’t some thrive on gentle patience while others thrive on discipline? Military school is not for everyone. Neither is Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
ARE DOGS PEOPLE TOO? Do they (to put the question in less sensational terms) think, reason, or experience mental states that are in any way comparable to our own? Bernie Brown assumes that they do not. Bill and Dick Koehler and Pete Jackson believe they do. Dan Tortora’s answer surprised me. He admits to being the product of a “very strict behaviorist upbringing,” and I expected him therefore to tell me that the question was a waste of time; that it’s useless to speculate about things we cannot observe; that we must restrict our study to things we can see—the input, the command, the stimulus, and the output, the behavior, the response; that what happens in between is not science, it’s philosophy. In other words, I expected the behaviorist party line, the sort of lecture that animal psychologists have been delivering since before B. F. Skinner was a grad student. Instead, Tortora answered my question with a brief disquisition on the difference between serial logic and right-brain parallel mental processes. His response was involved, somewhat technical, and full of careful qualifications, but its first words were “Yes, I think dogs think. . . .”
Tortora told me that when he studied psychology, he had a professor who would cock his eyebrows whenever he heard someone use a word such as mind or mental in connection with animals. About six months ago, Tortora said, he visited Michigan State and found the same fellow working on an experiment that looked suspiciously like a study in animal cognition. Times are changing. As evidence accumulates that chimps can use sign language and dolphins can imitate other animals, including their human keepers, scientists are being forced to confront the question of what goes on in an animal’s mind. One who has confronted it head-on, and has struggled manfully to drag his kicking and screaming colleagues along with him, is Donald R. Griffin, a former chairman of Harvard’s biology department and now a professor at the Rockefeller University. In 1976 Griffin published a book whose title, The Question of Animal Awareness, must have seemed blasphemous to some. His purpose was not so much to offer new evidence on the subject as to plead for an “open-minded agnosticism” regarding it—to clear away the orthodoxy of strict behaviorism.
One tenet of behaviorism that Griffin attacked quite directly was its claim to “parsimony.” This is science’s name for one of its most cherished concepts, the conviction that the best solution to any problem is the simplest and most direct. According to traditional behaviorism, parsimony dictates that a scientist who interprets animal behavior must do so without resort to a subjective mental state such as “thinking.” One of the earliest and most influential investigators of animal behavior, the British zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan, expressed it this way: “In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one that stands lower in the psychological scale.” In The Question of Animal Awareness, Griffin argued that this invocation of parsimony has become outdated, and he did so by turning the behaviorists’ own thinking against them. Behaviorists, he said, contend that mental processes are identical with neurophysiological processes (that is, they believe that the workings of the mind can be explained in terms of physical structures, chemical events, and so forth); neurophysiology, he pointed out, has yet to discover any fundamental difference between human neurons and those of other animals. So how can it be parsimonious, he asked, to claim that a vast gulf exists between human and animal mental experiences? “Unless one denies the reality of human mental experiences,” he wrote, “it is actually parsimonious to assume that mental experiences are as similar from species to species as are the neurophysiological processes with which they are held to be identical.” Further, Griffin asked, how can it be parsimonious to acknowledge our physiological continuity with other animal species, as we routinely do in any discussion of evolution, while postulating a huge discontinuity in mental abilities?
Griffin attacked behaviorism’s claim to parsimony in another way; this argument, though I suspect it is only incidentally important to him, may touch a nerve in anyone who has ever stood slack-jawed and awestruck at the things that animals are capable of doing. Griffin mentioned laboratory research showing that animals sometimes respond to stimuli not immediately, as is normally the case, but after some delay. Since this is incompatible with strict stimulus-response behaviorism, Griffin wrote, “psychologists have struggled to explain what keeps an animal ready to respond after appropriate delay by calling it ‘bridging.’ But,” he continued, this seems a major problem only if one’s thinking about animal behavior is constrained within the narrow limits of conventional, behavioristic learning theory. If we assume that the animal simply understands what it has learned, the delayed responses cease to be especially puzzling. Perhaps postulating simple thoughts in the minds of animals may result in more parsimonious, as well as more nearly correct, explanations.
I may be stretching this argument further than Griffin would like, but it reminded me of the marvelously complex dance of the honeybee, which Griffin described in another context early in the book. With the waggle dance, as it is called, a worker bee directs her comrades to a place where she has recently obtained food. In the darkness of the hive she dances in semicircles, alternating left and right, and after each she moves in a straight line, waggling her abdomen as she goes. The direction of these straight lines indicates the flower’s position with respect to the sun; the amount of time devoted to them indicates distance from the hive. Griffin points out that a bee will perform this dance not only immediately upon returning to the hive but also, under experimental circumstances, some time later. I wonder: How many events must a behaviorist arrange, and how artfully must he arrange them, to explain this extraordinary form of communication in terms of simple stimuli and automatic responses? How long before the “parsimonious” explanation becomes a hopelessly complicated house of cards? At what point does it become simpler to say that the bee remembers where the nectar came from and tells her friends how to get there?
By 1984, when he published another book, Animal Thinking, Griffin was able to report in his preface that now, “because of impressive progress in ethology and psychology, animal thinking is again receiving serious scientific attention.” I suspect that some time will pass, however, before this new open-mindedness filters down to the public at large. A case in point is Bernie Brown. At the obedience seminar in Tennessee, he recommended to his audience a newspaper article that he had read recently, in which some eminent academic had summarized the consensus among scientists—that animals do not think. Later the same weekend, Brown told a story that made me wonder if he hadn’t accepted this scientific orthodoxy at the expense of his own experience. He said that he and Duster had been competing in a dog show and had come to the retrieve exercise, in which the dog is required to fetch a small wooden dumbbell thrown by the handler. Because Duster was not in the habit of watching the dumbbell to see where it would land—part of his magic being that he kept his eyes fixed on his master—Brown considered it his job to make an accurate throw so that the dumbbell would be easy to find. But this time it took a freak bounce and landed behind a stanchion at the perimeter of the ring. Brown gave the command to retrieve. Duster bolted confidently from his side to the place where he expected the dumbbell to be—and stopped, frozen in panic. He began charging across the ring, this way and that, his speed increasing all the while, searching for the dumbbell that he’d been sent for. “He must have been out there three minutes,” Brown said. (The exercise normally takes less than fifteen seconds.) “Finally, his working pattern got him near the fence; he saw the dumbbell, charged the fence, picked the dumbbell up, brought it to me, did a perfect front, a perfect finish; and the expression on his face was like My God! Thank God! . . . The judge gave me a perfect score. Duster won that trial, and my peers were all over that judge. ‘How could you give that dog a perfect score? He worked three minutes before he picked up the dumbbell!’ And the judge’s answer was, ‘If I could have given extra points, I would have.’ Because the dog knew he just couldn’t find the dumbbell.”
Brown doesn’t believe that Duster was “thinking” when he performed this feat; rather, he says, the dog had simply learned, through years of training in this exercise, that he should not return to his master until he had something to bring back with him. I don’t mean to question Brown’s knowledge of his own dog (and I should point out that I have met many dog trainers who would agree with him), but I wonder: How often do we choke back an intuitive response to such a story in order to satisfy ourselves that we are scientific thinkers? To what length will we go to protect the notion that we are different in kind, not merely in degree, from the animals around us?
Our resistance to the idea that animals have mental abilities was once spoofed by the psycholinguist Roger Brown, whom Griffin quoted in his 1976 book: “Most people are determined to hold the line against animals,” Brown wrote in 1958. “Grant them the ability to make linguistic reference and they will be putting in a claim for minds and souls. The whole phyletic scale will come trooping into Heaven demanding immortality for every tadpole and hippopotamus.” As the animal-rights advocates remind us constantly, we cannot dwell long on the possibility that animals think without confronting the moral questions raised by the way we treat them. If animals are like us, the reasoning goes, what right do we have to kill them, eat them, tame them for our work and pleasure? What right have we to play God?
I don’t know, but as I visited with dog trainers and read their books, I bumped repeatedly into the idea that human beings are the gods of the dog universe. Bill Koehler says that dogs have knowledge of right and wrong, but of course he is the one who defines the terms and metes out the appropriate reward or punishment. Dick Koehler told me, “Come, sit, down, stay—that’s not really dog training. What you’re trying to do is get the dog to be responsible for his own actions, so that when he has to avoid a dog fight, stay out of trouble, or remain on a sit-stay or a down-stay on a blanket with six other dogs and you’re a quarter of a mile away, he knows that if he moves, God is gonna strike him dead on the spot, or you’re gonna come flying through the air and make a correction.” Barbara Woodhouse recommends that if a dog is in the habit of tearing at trouser cuffs and overcoats, the surest cure is to pour water on its head. “This method is better than all the scolding in the world,” she writes, “for the dog doesn’t know where the water comes from, he only comes to realize that cloth-tearing causes it to flow.” One of Daniel Tortora’s rules for the use of punishment is that it “should be like a ‘bolt from heaven.’ The dog should feel that no matter where you are, when he has transgressed he will be punished.” Richard Krokus, of the Seeing Eye, said it in so many words: “A dog is a dog, and you have to understand what makes them tick, and you have to get under their skin and make them think you’re God.”
Michael Fox wrote in the Soul of the Wolf that “man has made the dog in his own image.” In fact we have made the dog in a bewildering variety of images—a menagerie of shapes, sizes, and colors, none of which have much use or meaning without us. The English bulldog, carefully crafted over centuries of selective breeding, is just one example of our creativity. Today a “prize” bulldog is likely to be born by cesarean section for fear of the damage that its grossly enlarged head—a desirable trait in the show ring—might inflict on its mother during delivery. This breed and most of the others would not exist but for human meddling, and they wouldn’t last long if we didn’t provide their daily kibble. What right have we to play God with our dogs? A dog trainer might answer that it’s not a right but a responsibility: You made this animal, now you teach it how to get along in the world.
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Copyright 1986 by Michael Lenehan. All rights reserved.